.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Technology is above requiring an interpretation; it interprets itself. You merely need to select the right objects and place them precisely in the picture; then they tell their story of their own accord’ (M. Köhler, Interview mit Bernd und Hilla Becher’, in Künstler. Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Munich, 1989, reprinted in A. Zweite, ‘Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “Suggestion for a Way of Seeing”: Ten Key Ideas’, in Bernd & Hilla Becher: Typologies, Cambridge, 2004, p. 9).
Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of the past five decades document the lexicon of industrial architecture in the Western world. Together the German husband and wife team have photographed hundreds of structures including water towers, winding towers, cooling towers and mine heads as seen here in English Mineheads, 1966-1997. The only visible feature of a mine shaft, the minehead stands above ground, the various configurations of hoists, wheels, or bins denoting the historic purpose of each individual mine. With their typological approach to the photographic medium, in which a single archetypal subject is described through an accumulation of diverse examples, the Bechers have gone on to influence an entire generation of German photographers and Conceptual artists, making them an undeniable leading influence in postwar art history.
In its seemingly objective and scientific character, this project finds a basic influence in the pre-war New Objectivity, a movement which espoused a return to ‘straight’ aesthetics. Indeed this condensation into graphic and sculptural form of the apparently endless structural variations on similar themes becomes a project more about aestheticizing industry rather than industrializing art. This reprisal of themes from the 1920s and 1930s in the postwar period is as much a response to the sentimental subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early post-war period as it is about rephrasing the subject of vernacular photography. However there is also an element of architectural history at play here. Through their intense focus on the formal elements of these structures as captured in their photographs, the Bechers are able to imbue the same monumentality and timelessness that is characteristic of historically significant architecture into their depictions of industrial structures and forms, which comparatively, have a shorter life-span and are less revered for their cultural value. Through their thorough photographic examination, the Bechers have succeeded in altering our perception of these structures, stripping them of their past industrial humming, to one of silent contemplation and calm.
The Bechers had a keen interest in presenting how structures related to one another in terms of form and function. In order to achieve this, the Bechers began by assigning motifs in their structural typologies to ‘work groups’, which they progressively subdivided according to particular recurring characteristics. Composed in tableaux driven by the functional and structural properties of the structures, in this case of fifteen, the arrangement of the images in rows produces an equalizing effect which reinforces the repetitive character of the series. Indeed, as theartists note, the pattern of ‘rhythms and repetitions’ established between the individual pictures is ‘very much the idea of the work’ (B. and H. Becher, quoted in R.A. Sobieszak, ‘Two Books of Ultra-Photography’, Image, vol. 14, 1971, p. 12). In the grid’s juxtaposition of similar structures, the Bechers paradoxically bring about an appreciation for the idiosyncratic differences and formal irregularities of the architecture. ‘You can only see the differences between the objects when they are close together, because they are sometimes very subtle’ Hilla explains, ‘All the objects in one family resemble each other, they are similar. But they also have a very special individuality’ (H. Becher, quoted in J. Lingwood, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Robert Smithson: Field Trips, exh. cat., Museu de Arte contemporânea de Serralves, Porta, 2002, p. 73). As such, in their study of water towers, winding towers, cooling towers and gasometers, the Bechers ‘offer the audience a point of view, or rather a grammar, to understand and compare the different structures’ (B. and H. Becher, quoted in L. Touraine, ‘Bernd and Hilla Becher: The Function doesn’t make the Form’, in Artefactum, April – May, 1989, p. 9).
Because of the formal resolution and consistency of their work, their photographs have often been likened to sculpture. Although the photographic documents do have sculptural qualities, they are also presented by the artists like painted pictures, and thereby act as the art historian Benjamin Buchloh notes as ‘an exemplary historical compromise between painting and photography’. It is not aesthetics alone that the Bechers are calling into question; the function, utility, and economic criteria governing the constructions that are photographed influence their choices here. Indeed the Bechers call their photographic subjects ‘anonymous sculpture’, and the two won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1990. The central placement of the structures imbues them with a certain drama of presence that evokes the austerity of Minimalist forms. As Bernd Becher explains, ‘It’s not a case of photographing everything in the world, but of proving that there is a form of architecture that consists in essence of apparatus, that has nothing to do with design, and nothing to do with architecture either. They are engineering constructions with their own aesthetic’ (B. Becher, quoted in U. Erdmann Ziegler, ‘The Bechers’ Industrial Lexicon’, Art in America, June 2002).
The present selection of images were created using a Plaubel 13x18 cm plate camera which enabled the Bechers to execute photographs with an exceptional degree of definition. The Bechers depict these vernacular structures with stunning consistency using their methodically determined system of formal analysis which captures each architectural element frontally against a neutral, cloudless sky. Through this formal handling, the unadorned, purely functional edifices become flattened, allowing their facades to become the most dominant characteristic rather than their function. With the surfaces oscillating between minute architectural detail and minimalist abstraction, the artists allow these structures to take on a transcendental beauty that moves them beyond their original functional purpose.
Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of the past five decades document the lexicon of industrial architecture in the Western world. Together the German husband and wife team have photographed hundreds of structures including water towers, winding towers, cooling towers and mine heads as seen here in English Mineheads, 1966-1997. The only visible feature of a mine shaft, the minehead stands above ground, the various configurations of hoists, wheels, or bins denoting the historic purpose of each individual mine. With their typological approach to the photographic medium, in which a single archetypal subject is described through an accumulation of diverse examples, the Bechers have gone on to influence an entire generation of German photographers and Conceptual artists, making them an undeniable leading influence in postwar art history.
In its seemingly objective and scientific character, this project finds a basic influence in the pre-war New Objectivity, a movement which espoused a return to ‘straight’ aesthetics. Indeed this condensation into graphic and sculptural form of the apparently endless structural variations on similar themes becomes a project more about aestheticizing industry rather than industrializing art. This reprisal of themes from the 1920s and 1930s in the postwar period is as much a response to the sentimental subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early post-war period as it is about rephrasing the subject of vernacular photography. However there is also an element of architectural history at play here. Through their intense focus on the formal elements of these structures as captured in their photographs, the Bechers are able to imbue the same monumentality and timelessness that is characteristic of historically significant architecture into their depictions of industrial structures and forms, which comparatively, have a shorter life-span and are less revered for their cultural value. Through their thorough photographic examination, the Bechers have succeeded in altering our perception of these structures, stripping them of their past industrial humming, to one of silent contemplation and calm.
The Bechers had a keen interest in presenting how structures related to one another in terms of form and function. In order to achieve this, the Bechers began by assigning motifs in their structural typologies to ‘work groups’, which they progressively subdivided according to particular recurring characteristics. Composed in tableaux driven by the functional and structural properties of the structures, in this case of fifteen, the arrangement of the images in rows produces an equalizing effect which reinforces the repetitive character of the series. Indeed, as theartists note, the pattern of ‘rhythms and repetitions’ established between the individual pictures is ‘very much the idea of the work’ (B. and H. Becher, quoted in R.A. Sobieszak, ‘Two Books of Ultra-Photography’, Image, vol. 14, 1971, p. 12). In the grid’s juxtaposition of similar structures, the Bechers paradoxically bring about an appreciation for the idiosyncratic differences and formal irregularities of the architecture. ‘You can only see the differences between the objects when they are close together, because they are sometimes very subtle’ Hilla explains, ‘All the objects in one family resemble each other, they are similar. But they also have a very special individuality’ (H. Becher, quoted in J. Lingwood, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Robert Smithson: Field Trips, exh. cat., Museu de Arte contemporânea de Serralves, Porta, 2002, p. 73). As such, in their study of water towers, winding towers, cooling towers and gasometers, the Bechers ‘offer the audience a point of view, or rather a grammar, to understand and compare the different structures’ (B. and H. Becher, quoted in L. Touraine, ‘Bernd and Hilla Becher: The Function doesn’t make the Form’, in Artefactum, April – May, 1989, p. 9).
Because of the formal resolution and consistency of their work, their photographs have often been likened to sculpture. Although the photographic documents do have sculptural qualities, they are also presented by the artists like painted pictures, and thereby act as the art historian Benjamin Buchloh notes as ‘an exemplary historical compromise between painting and photography’. It is not aesthetics alone that the Bechers are calling into question; the function, utility, and economic criteria governing the constructions that are photographed influence their choices here. Indeed the Bechers call their photographic subjects ‘anonymous sculpture’, and the two won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1990. The central placement of the structures imbues them with a certain drama of presence that evokes the austerity of Minimalist forms. As Bernd Becher explains, ‘It’s not a case of photographing everything in the world, but of proving that there is a form of architecture that consists in essence of apparatus, that has nothing to do with design, and nothing to do with architecture either. They are engineering constructions with their own aesthetic’ (B. Becher, quoted in U. Erdmann Ziegler, ‘The Bechers’ Industrial Lexicon’, Art in America, June 2002).
The present selection of images were created using a Plaubel 13x18 cm plate camera which enabled the Bechers to execute photographs with an exceptional degree of definition. The Bechers depict these vernacular structures with stunning consistency using their methodically determined system of formal analysis which captures each architectural element frontally against a neutral, cloudless sky. Through this formal handling, the unadorned, purely functional edifices become flattened, allowing their facades to become the most dominant characteristic rather than their function. With the surfaces oscillating between minute architectural detail and minimalist abstraction, the artists allow these structures to take on a transcendental beauty that moves them beyond their original functional purpose.